Chapter 2 #2
I caught those. I felt a sudden flush of arousal at the thought of it. I was supposed to mate with him?
It was crazy. There had to have been a mistake.
I formed the argument in my mind.
You have the wrong woman. I am not a fated anything. I am not a mate of anything. I felt a little nervous laugh at the back of my throat.
He wanted to mate with me? He’d tear me apart, he’d break me. It would be like being with an animal.
“You have the wrong woman.”
I said it. My voice was small.
He arched an eyebrow, looked at me with the kind of mild amusement that was threatening to bring me, trembling, to me knees.
“You have the wrong woman.” I said it again, slightly louder, the same way you say a wrong number on a phone call, slightly louder the second time.
“I—there’s been some kind of—I’m a skating coach.
I’m a junior coach. At a rink in a strip mall in Spokane Valley, Washington.
I coach four-to-seven-year-olds on Saturdays.
I do the cone weave with them. I make sure they don’t fall on the rentals. I’m—“
I made my hands stay at my sides. They wanted to come up.
“Whatever you think the Veil pulled across into your—your hall, your—whatever this is—it isn’t—I’m not— “
My voice cracked.
“Please, Maria, it’s alright.”
I closed my mouth.
His face did not change. He stood, with the white-and-gold falling perfectly around him and he held my eyes.
He let me have my silence, just for a beat.
Then he spoke.
“I know exactly who you are, precious one. Rest assured. Exactly who you are. I know how you spend your Saturdays. I know your dedication to those children. I have, in fact, watched you your whole life.”
I do not know what I had expected him to say. It was not that.
“I’ve seen you skate. Years ago.” He was very quiet. “Before your fall.”
His expression didn’t change. No pity.
“And during it, of course. I saw your fall. Saw your pain, your sadness. I watched,” he said with feeling, “the diminishment of your pride.”
He did not flinch. He did not soften. He said it as a fact about me, and the saying of it did not, in his mouth, belittle me.
“I have remembered your face since. Every inch of it.”
I believed him.
It sat in me like swallowed ice. The cold of it moved down the line of my throat and settled under my sternum next to the other low private thing that lived there, and the two of them met.
Pride did not move.
He stood three paces off, in his white and his gold and his deep wine red, and he watched my face.
“You do not believe you belong here,” he said.
It was not a question.
“I don’t,” I said, my voice small.
“And yet,” he said, “the Veil opened to you. The Veil does not open to women who do not belong. The Veil opens to my opposite, and you are mine.”
I bit the inside of my left cheek.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“No.” His mouth did something at the corner that was almost a smile and was not. “No, of course you do not. Allow me.”
He took one half-step forward. Not a full pace. A consideration. A courtesy.
“I was born with pride,” he said.
He said it flatly. As though he were reading out a charge against himself in a court of law.
“I have never had to earn it. I have never had to choose it. I have never been required to summon it from any difficult place in my body, because I have not, in the long age of my existence, been in a difficult place. I sit on a throne I did not build. I rule a domain that bends to my mood without my consent. I am the presumptive heir of the Obsidian seat and I have never, in all my years, woken in the morning uncertain of my own worth. I was made this way. And yet, I have Pride—for I am it. I am the sin, and I am the lord of the sin, and the sin is my whole inheritance.”
He let the words sit on the marble between us. The hall did not echo. Halls like this one knew better than to echo over a man like him.
“You,” he said, “are my opposite.”
The eyes shifted, the gold of them moving in those slow rings, and they held my face the way they had held it from the throne—steady, unblinking, without measurement.
“You were born with something I have never had. You were born with talent. You were born with grace. You were born with a determination so absolute that it made you, by the age of twenty-one, the finest skater alive on your world. You earned every inch of your magnificence. Every inch. You were the truest version of pride that has ever existed, precious one, because yours was made and mine was given.”
He let that one sit too. I felt my knee click. Nobody heard. Nobody ever heard.
“And then,” he said, very quietly, “you lost it. But you shouldn’t have. It should burn in you still.”
The cold under my sternum became something else. Something hotter. Something worse.
“Don’t,” I said.
“The Veil opens,” he continued, as though I had not spoken, as though don’t was a word he had decided long ago not to recognise from me, “to the woman who is my opposite in the precise place I am most hollow. You are the only being in any of the seven realms who has earned what I was given, and the only one who has lost what I cannot ever lose. Do you understand me, Maria. You are not here by accident. The Veil does not lift accidentally. There is no other woman it could have called.”
I made a sound.
It was supposed to be a laugh. It came out of me wrong—too high, too thin, a sound I did not recognise from my own throat. I put my left hand over my mouth and the right hand stayed in the kangaroo pocket. The cougar’s loose paw moved against my sternum in the small wind.
“This is a hallucination,” I said.
I said it into my own hand.
“I haven’t eaten since six.” My voice was the rink-coach voice, on autopilot, the bright competent voice I used to tell parents about their kids.
“I’ve been low-blood-sugar before, I know what it feels like, I—I drove the Zamboni, I—the diesel fumes, sometimes the diesel fumes, in a closed building, with the chiller off—I’m having an episode, I’m, I’m on the rubber matting at center ice and I’m—I’m going to wake up, I’m going to wake up in a minute, this isn’t—”
“You are not hallucinating, and you know this.”
So simply put.
“You are in the realm beneath your own. You are in Infernum. You are, in the language of your people, in hell.”
The word landed in my chest.
It landed in a small bright awful way. It was true, I knew it.
Hell.
I had been a churchgoer once. Not for years. But long enough.
“No,” I said.
“Yes.”
“No, I—”
“Yes, precious one. But not the hell you are afraid of.” He said it gently.
“There are no souls in agony here. There is no fire of damnation. There is no judgement of your life waiting at the end of this hall. The word your people use is a translation, and it is a poor one. This is the underworld. A shadow realm beside the one you lived in. Older than your world, parallel to it, lit by no sun. Beautiful. Mostly. We are not what your scriptures say we are. We are something else, and you are not in any danger from any of it.”
I did not entirely hear the second half.
The first half had done its work, and the panic that had been propped up was already moving sideways and finding what it was actually about.
“The kids.”
I said it before I knew I was going to.
“The kids—Theo, Theo is four, Theo’s mother drops him at nine on Saturday, if I’m not there—Nova, oh, God, Nova—Tuesday at six, I was supposed to talk to Marcus on Monday, Marcus doesn’t know about Tuesday at six, Kate is going to bring her at six and Marcus isn’t going to know, and the rink—the rink barely makes payroll, there’s a leak in the back office, the chiller is on its last legs, if I don’t—if I’m not there to do the Saturday lockup next week, the rink, the rink will—”
“Hush.”
He said it like that. The one word. Hush.
It worked.
My mouth stopped, and my throat stopped, and the moving sideways stopped, and I stood in my doubled white trainers on the cold gold-veined marble and I looked at him because there was nothing else available to do.
“It is taken care of.”
He said it as though he were saying the rain has been arranged.
“Your rink is well funded as of three days ago. The leak in the back office has been repaired. The chiller has been replaced. There is an envelope of operating capital sufficient for two seasons in the safe under the counter, and the board of the facility has unanimously voted, this past Wednesday evening, to engage a senior coach. Olympic medalist. Bronze, Salt Lake, ladies’ singles.
She begins Monday. She will teach Nova. She will teach all of them.
They will not lack for anything. None of them. ”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“It is taken care of, precious one.”
The voice did not change. The eyes did not change. He was not bragging. He was stating the weather.
“Three—three days ago.” I heard my own voice come out very small. “You did this three days ago.”
“I did,” he said.
“You knew, three days ago, that I—”
“I knew, three days ago,” he said, “that the Veil was about to open.” He sounded a wry chuckele. “I have known for longer than that. Much, much longer. There were arrangements to be made, and I have had a long time to make them, and I have not been an idle man.”
He let me have a beat with that.
“The decision,” he said, “is yours. The Veil is not a cage. If you wish to return to your world, you may. I will open it for you now. There will be no consequence. The rink will continue to be funded. The children will be taught. You will go back to your apartment in Spokane Valley and you will live the life you have chosen, and I will not be the one who takes that from you. The choice is yours alone.”
Silence.
I could go? If I wanted to?
“I should go.”
The words were out of me before I had decided.